We are misunderstanding the strenghts of open source (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 day ago by libre_warrior@lemmy.ml to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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We misunderstand the strengths of the commons of tools and not knowing how we play to our strengths.

Free software today is usually promoted through big brands like libreoffice, gimp or firefox. These are successful in terms of branding, but is not playing to the strengths of the commons. In the commons, we move away from the walled and towards the interconnected.

The strenghts doesn't lie in bloated and branded tools, but rather in the small tools that anyone can make if they have some spare time. We need to reframe away from the bloatedness to the caresome. Where the tools are easily made, available by birth and easily tinkerable.

And we need towards the descriptive instead of the branded. Towards letting words dictate tools instead of tools dictating words.

Today operating systems revolves around the branded, bloated and wasteful. The lokening is to move towards operating systems that inbosoms the caresome and descriptive.

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[-] cheese_greater@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I know its super in-fashion to shit on the concept of "vibe coding" but I really do wish there was a more boilerplate way to remove having to worry about designing the UI/UX so I could focus on getting the MVP functionality down and having it relatively neatly display, more akin to designing a form or Apple Shortcut.

I have tons of forms I've designed that are basically de facto programs that I can whip up super easily and just pick the data "type" for each "line" of the form which essentialky equates to a line or block of code in a code program. Decent looking enough, interactive, can easily high-level edit and tweak shit and test it to make sure it mostly fool-proof produces the outputs that are needed.

Whenever I think of all the graphical and UI and UX stuff that has to go into making a viable app I get so discouraged, I hate having to think about all that stuff and the geeking around to make it functional let alone aesthetic

[-] it_depends_man@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

a more boilerplate way to remove having to worry about designing the UI/UX so I could focus on [blank]

Yes.

In a way, it is super funny ironic / funny to me that we have basically no actual GUI standard. There is Qt, there is stuff with html/css/js, and the rest just lack tons of features.

No idea how it works on windows tbh.

Making a cli app? Sure, easy peasy, done in 5 mintues. Making a small GUI app? Strap in for 2 weeks of basics how this framework chose to solve certain issues.

[-] HotChickenFeet@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 day ago

I realize it's just another framework. But I think the next time I'm building something useful beyond a basic CLI I will try textualize. https://github.com/Textualize/textual?tab=readme-ov-file

I don't care much about aesthetic and a similar interface for terminal/web seems like it would be useful.

That said, I fully agree that it's daunting to have to deal with any existing ui. It's really tiresome to jump through multiple hoops just to get/show info - even before trying to make it pretty.

[-] JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 4 points 1 day ago

I haven't tried it myself, but isn't GTK supposed to be good at that?

[-] sxan@midwest.social 3 points 1 day ago

There used to be WYSIWYG GUI designers for both GTK and KDE. There was even one that generated XUL, which Firefox used for a while, IIRC.

Did all those disappear?

I just too everything in TUIs; since I program in Go, that means tview for me. It's really low-effort to get into. But if you want a GUI, surely there's still a UI builder for KDE.